Greek authorities are scrambling to deal with unrest at a heavily overcrowded migrant camp on Lesbos after a fire there left at least one person dead.

Officials said they had found the charred remains of an Afghan woman after the blaze erupted inside a container used to house refugees at the Moria reception centre on Sunday. The fire was eventually extinguished by plane.

More than 13,000 people are now crammed into tents and shipping containers with facilities for just 3,000 at Moria, a disused military barracksoutside Mytilene, the island's capital, where tensions are rising.

"A charred body was found, causing foreign [migrants] to rebel," said Lefteris Economou, Greece's deputy minister for citizen protection. "Stones and other objects were hurled, damaging three fire engines and slightly injuring four policemen and a fireman."

The health ministry said 19 people including four children were injured, most of them in the clashes. There were separate claims that a child died with the Afghan woman.

Greece's centre-right government said it would immediately step up transfers to the mainland. The camp is four times over capacity. "By the end of Monday 250 people will have been moved," Economou said.

Like other Aegean isles near the Turkish coast, Lesbos has witnessed a sharp rise in arrivals of asylum seekers desperate to reach Europe in recent months.

"The situation was totally out of control," said the local police chief, Vasillis Rodopoulos, describing the melee sparked by the fire. "Their behaviour was very aggressive, they wouldn't let the fire engines pass to put out the blaze, and for the first time they were shouting: kill police."

But NGO workers on Lesbos said the chaos reflected growing frustration among the camp's occupants. There have been several fires at the facility since the EU struck a deal with Turkey in 2016 to stem the flow of migrants. A woman and child died in a similar blaze three years ago.

"No one can call the fire and these deaths an accident," said Marco Sandrone, a field officer with Médecins Sans Frontières. "This tragedy is the direct result of a brutal policy that is trapping 13,000 people in a camp made for 3,000.

Comment: The tragedy is actually a direct result of EU/UN enforced mass migration policies that overwhelm host countries with migrants leaving them lacking in resources to house and process applicants, as well as denying them the ability to deport those those that do not fulfill the criteria, which is the vast majority. It is also a direct result of the malignant actions of the West around the planet:

"European and Greek authorities who continue to contain these people in these conditions have a responsibility in the repetition of these dramatic episodes. It is high time to stop the EU-Turkey deal and this inhumane policy of containment. People must be urgently evacuated out of the hell that Moria has become."

Greece currently hosts around 85,000 refugees, mostly from Syriaalthough recent arrivals have also been from Afghanistan and Africa.Close to 35,000 have arrived this year, outstripping the numbers in Italy and Spain.

It is a critical issue for the prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, who won office two months ago promising to crack down on migration.

Mitsotakis raised the matter with Turkey's president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, on the sidelines of the UN general assembly in New York last week, and Greece's migration minister and the head of the coastguard will fly to Turkey for talks this week.

Ministers admit the island camps can no longer deal with the rise in numbers.

Government spokesman Stelios Petsas announced that a cabinet meeting called to debate emergency measures had on Monday decided to radically increase the number of deportations of asylum seekers whose requests are rejected.

"There will be an increase in returns [to Turkey]," he said. "From 1,806 returned in 4.5 years under the previous Syriza government, 10,000 will be returned by the end of 2020."

Closed detention centres would also be established for those who had illegally entered the EU member state and did not qualify for asylum, he added.

However, Spyros Galinos, until recently the mayor of Lesbos, who held the post when close to a million Syrian refugees landed on the island, told the Guardian: "This is a bomb that will explode. Decongestion efforts aren't enough. You move more to the mainland and others come. It's a cycle that will continue repeating itself with devastating effect until the big explosion comes."

Ragnar Well, maybe way back when Plato and his ilk rightfully had young men for bed while women couldn't keep horny heterosexual males from harassing and/or raping them and otherwise causing themselves to be very dislikable toward Greek women. Lesbos became their Raison D'être (or whatever the greek equivalent may be).

P.s., I have my own 'Lord of the Flies' story from when I was 13? Two of us had to kick ass on an entire boy scout troop of about 26? other kids - fully justified too. (Imagine, two scouts mosquito screen zipped into their pup tents, seven in a row, and yours truly stomping on faces, kicking ribs, cutting ropes while my co-escapee did the same to the row of seven pup tents on the north side. By the time anyone got out, we were back in the woods, where we'd rightfully escaped from the LOF situation in the first place.

Then we waited til they slept, (watching from under palmetto bushes - ignoring the mosquitoes and roaches crawling over us) - waiting... again...for them to all go back to bed. Gave 'em about 15 mins of zzs before we struck again!!!

Rowan Cocoan LOL...its a funny combination of being around 13 years old combined with camping with your peers that make for some surreal childhood memories...almost as if they spiked our food with hallucinogens or something... I still remember some of that weirdness like it was yesterday....like good old 'Camp Duncan' in Illinois...like seven days of being in a Roger Waters film....

If we'd not kicked ass, we'd have been traumatized for live, and I probably wouldn't couldn't even talk about it. But being fast and learning to be tough at an early age made all the difference. It is a 'feel good' story for individuals, up against a bunch of wannabe AF's.

Re--the SOTT comment. It is more the fault of the US, which conducts open-ended war and bombing across the Middle East, burning these people's towns, killing their crops, putting them out of work and killing their relatives. Once they find there is no long a future for them where they live, they move away. Stop these foolish regime-change wars and the flight of these refugees will at least slow down if not cease altogether.

ClintWestwood Good point. However, so long as the PTB seek to destroy the freedom of individuals in the West, they will find a way to get economic refugees in the doors. We just got 20K from the Congo? into Maine?